Tracey Emin was born in 1963. She was brought up like a princess in her parents' hotel in Margate until the age of seven, when, in a very Dickensian way, the business crashed, her parents split up, and she found herself in the poorhouse. It was the perfect start for a career in the arts: if Emin had never produced any work at all, she could have made us believe she was an artist just by brandishing her CV.

Emin hated school and stopped at 13, but 10 years later she talked her way into Maidstone art college. She then moved to London, eventually leaving the Royal College of Art with an MA in painting. But the break-up of a relationship and then a botched abortion led to a crisis: she destroyed all her paintings, and only began working again when she befriended another artist, Sarah Lucas, one of the Young British Artists who had taken part in the seminal Freeze exhibition.

In 1993 the pair opened up a shop in London's East End where they sold T-shirts with slogans like "I'm so fucky". It was never going to make huge amounts of money, but Emin got her confidence back.

Meanwhile, a British public beyond the tiny world of gallery openings and sales was slowly becoming aware that interesting things were happening in the art world. In 1994 Emin produced Everyone I Have Ever Slept With - a tent embroidered with the names of every person with whom she had ever shared a bed, no sex necessary. She talks about going to the show and seeing TV cameras pointing at her and thinking, "Oh God, I've arrived." But she really became Our Tracey during her infamous drunken television appearance in 1997, when she stumbled off a panel discussion about the Turner prize because it was boring and she wanted to phone her mum.

For an era that appeared to claim nine-tenths of art's purpose to be provocation, Emin was a genius. Anyone who suggested she was not going to be able to follow up her tent was silenced by My Bed (1999), the Turner-prize nominated installation of a bed in which she claimed to have spent a week after a bad break-up complete with vodka bottles, cigarette butts and pregnancy tests. It was one of the most famous installations in recent years, sending Daily Mail readers into hurricanes of fury and making 1999 one of the most talked-about Turner prize years ever, although Emin did not actually win.

Emin's ability to grab headlines meant that, like many of the YBAs, she was pigeonholed from the beginning. In her case, it was as a naughty girl. The reason she has survived is that there is more to her than that. Half of the critics want to write her off with charges like "creative incontinence" (Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times), but time and again she manages to turn the other half round. Reviewers end up admitting that they expected to hate this or that Emin exhibition, but there was something about it...

Because Emin is so fond of the sound of her own voice, it can be hard to get through to the actual work (art critic Julian Stallabrass said sniffily: "It's so unmediated, I wonder if it's actually art."). That's a great shame. Emin's Self Portrait at her White Cube exhibition in 2001 was a 17-feet-tall helter-skelter, built from reclaimed wood, with birds flying out of the top. It was a thing of beauty, both remarkable and evocative. Another exhibition, I Think It's in My Head, in New York in 2002, featured flowering plants with small plaster models of sparrows, a bronze cast of Emin's head, and a canopied bed embroidered in the style she has made her own. Slap up against the drawings of Emin with her legs splayed open, or the cocky schoolgirl slogans ("Fuck school Why go somewhere to be told your late everyday") are beehives and flip-flops and pussycats. There is a girlish and vulnerable side revealed in her work that can unman critics and audiences.

It has helped her create a fanbase far broader than most modern artists'. (One ex-boyfriend was told that she wanted to become a household name. "What, like Harpic?" he asked.) During a recent television discussion the artist was asked how she would have been influenced by Tracey Emin as a teenager in Margate. "I'd have fucking loved her," she said simply, and that sounds about right. Emin is confused, angry, and the grown-ups don't understand her.